The Holocaust – Part II Race-based Genocide,

Transported to Concentration Camps Once the war began in earnest, extermination camps were opened and the systematic murder of non- Aryan people – Jewish, Roma, Poles, political prisoners, and anyone else deemed unfit – began. People were forced into railroad boxcars and sent to the camps.

Einstazgruppen While Jewish populations in mainland Europe were rounded up and transported to concentration camps in the East, Russian Jews were brutalized by mobile killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen. The murdering soldiers here gathered around their ghastly work and took photographs, demonstrating the inhuman callousness of the Nazis.

Einsatzgruppen The Einsatzgruppen are believed to have executed close to one million Russian Jews, and countless others. The members of these Nazi killing squads were frequently so dehumanized themselves that they took their own lives in despair for what they had become. Many of the Jewish citizens of Russia were shot close range. Later in the war, mobile units used vans to gas the Russian Jews using cyanide.

Einsatzgruppen Massacres Throughout the Soviet Union

Meanwhile, Jewish citizens across Europe were being rounded up, forced onto boxcars, and transported to concentration camps in the East. Soon, Hitler’s Final Solution would be put into full effect – and millions would be murdered.

Auschwitz Of all the concentration camps and death camps, Auschwitz was the deadliest and the most fearful. The atrocities are unspeakable. Infants were thrown into furnaces. Men, women, and children were brutalized, raped, gassed, or burned alive. Children were taken from their mothers and put to death. Those who survived the “selections” upon arrival were put to work for the duration of the war – they were systematically starved to death, though, and the sick or weak would be executed.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz – Women’s Barracks.

Josef Mengele Known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Mengele was responsible for choosing which prisoners would live and which would die upon arrival at the camps. He conducted experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Many of his patients were children, and he particularly sought out twins to conduct gruesome experiments which invariably ended in death.

Auschwitz Although it is impossible to recreate the depth of the brutality and inhumanity which took place at Auschwitz, members of the Allied armed forces who discovered the death camps attempted to document what had transpired here for future generations to understand what the racism, hatred, and cruelty of Nazism had produced – and to remind humanity what we are capable of when we lose our sense of devotion to one another and to righteousness.

The Victims of the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel, Night Elie Wiesel is a Romanian- born Jew who survived the Holocaust – but lost everything in the process. He saw his family die at Auschwitz, felt the despair and brutality of the Holocaust at its worst, and somehow lived to tell his story. The novel Night, a personal memoir of the atrocities of the Holocaust, is one of the most remarkable accounts of the Holocaust. In the time since its publication, Wiesel has become a well known author – and followed up his work with the publications of Dawn and Day.